The major brokerage has announced a new suite of tools and a proactive tightening of systems to improve efficiencies and safeguard against the rising threat of mortgage fraud.
The REA Group-owned brokerage has unveiled a greater push into building its own artificial intelligence tools and increasing security support to ensure its brokers are as efficient and secure as possible.
The moves come as broker market share reaches historical highs, with brokers originating eight out of every 10 residential home loans and between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of commercial loans nationwide.
To preserve consumer trust amid growing concerns surrounding mortgage fraud, particularly from AI-generated payslips and documentation, the network is investing heavily in new tools, technology, and personnel to ensure its brokers are operating efficiently and effectively.
REA Group this week announced it had hired its first chief AI officer, Thyago Liberalli, to manage its growing AI strategy, and is actively recruiting an additional chief information security officer dedicated exclusively to its broker operations.
Addressing delegates at the Mortgage Choice Ignite national conference in Hobart, Tasmania on Tuesday, Mortgage Choice CEO Anthony Waldron addressed the industry threat environment directly.
“The mortgage fraud headlines that you see are coming through the papers at the moment. We’ve got to make sure that we continue to hold the trust of our consumers. We’ve got to make sure that we’re at the forefront of that, making sure that we’re protecting our consumers in everything that we do,” Waldron said.
“At the same time, we’ve got to focus on security. The cyber threat is not getting smaller; it is getting larger. With the addition of AI and some of the new models that are coming, it is only going to become a bigger threat.
“There will be some big blow-up in our industry in this space in the next 12 months. There will be. We need to make sure that we’re as advanced as we can be in that, the last thing we want to be is a target in that environment.
“We are hiring additional people into this space. As many of you have met our chief information security officer from an REA perspective, we’re hiring another one who will be completely focused on Mortgage Choice as well. We need to make sure we stay at the forefront of this space.”
The Mortgage Choice CEO added that the brokerage was restricting access to certain external systems to shield consumer financial data and eliminate potential security vulnerabilities while building out its own AI tools in-house.
Waldron revealed that the group had been actively building its own AI tools and agents since launching its AI strategy last year and now has 13 AI-native platforms and tools to streamline high-effort, repetitive tasks and reduce broker administration. These include AI Gems to assist with marketing and lead generation, client engagement and communications, and application and policy searches.
He said the brokerage would be introducing a new AI component that is engineered to handle manual documentation processing and provide additional security screening.
Speaking to brokers, the CEO said: “In particular, the first aspect of that is document processing AI agents in the first component. There is a whole bunch of things that we can do using AI to make it easier for you. Whether it’s redaction of TFNs, whether it’s renaming the files so they become easily transferable, whether there’s a whole bunch of activity that will be involved in that.
“But our aim here is to reduce the time that you have to spend manually working on these documents and manually changing them, manually getting it set up for you, and we ultimately believe that we can reduce that time on the document processing piece by about 60–80 per cent with what’s coming.”
Aside from AI tools, the brokerage revealed it is also partnering with PropTrack to launch localised “affordability reports” to guide buyers in shifting rate environments while enhancing its tech stack through data-mapping automation in Loan App, a new client broker portal, and REA-integrated lead management platforms.
Government hails AI as ‘the biggest economic transformation in our lifetime’
The national aggregator’s security and technology push comes as the government looks to improve greater take-up of AI. On Tuesday, federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers outlined how Australia can become a “big winner” from the global technology transition.
Writing in an opinion piece published on Tuesday (1 September), Chalmers declared that “AI is shaping up to be the biggest economic transformation in our lifetime”, citing Treasury analysis that identifies it as “the first substantive, credible global productivity growth accelerant in almost two decades”.
“In other words, it can help lift productivity performance and living standards despite significant global volatility which is intensifying pressures at home. It has the potential to unlock new well‑paid jobs and new ways of working, including in the care economy that Australia will increasingly rely on as our population ages,” Chalmers said.
“If we get this right, we can attract billions more in investment, grow our AI sovereignty, position Australia as the business partner of choice in our region, and create new high‑value opportunities that combine workers’ expertise and experience with new tools and training.”
Pointing to the shift from early chatbots to advanced agentic models, the Treasurer stressed that government and industry must work to “maximise the substantial economic opportunities of this technological revolution and minimise the serious risks”.
Chalmers said: “Our Australian standards for AI will be world‑leading, giving businesses the confidence to invest and communities the safeguards they expect.
“They will build on the work we’ve already done to secure favourable terms for Australian AI start‑ups and give businesses and workers the tools to adopt AI in their day‑to‑day.
“And they will be informed by the work we are doing to measure and manage impacts on the labour market.
“We are well positioned to be a big winner in this AI economic revolution if we get this right.
“We are better placed, better prepared and have a better plan than most other countries – and the IGR will make that clear.
“Through collaboration across the economy and sensible management of the substantial risks, technology can help us secure that holy grail of higher living standards and higher productivity in the interests of our people.
“That makes me optimistic that Australians can be beneficiaries of the accelerating change happening all around us in the decades to come.”
[Related: Mortgage Choice unveils AI tool to flag active buyers, sellers]
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